Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Selecting a Development Language

Now it's time to figure out what you're going to build this thing with! If you're already a developer, you probably have a preferred language you like to write in. If you're a marketer or a business owner, you probably don't really care to do much development, but you're reading this book to hopefully get your hands at least a little bit dirty. that's okay. Facebook has solutions for both types.

Facebook either provides, or has developers who have provided libraries for just about every programming language. I cover a few of those in the following sections.

The Facebook JavaScript SDK

The Facebook JavaScript SDK is Facebook's default and easiest-to-use library, and it's the focus of most of the new examples in Facebook's documentation at the time of this writing. Including the software development kit (SDK) is simply a matter of calling the library and then initializing it using some simple JavaScript code. I show you how to do this in Chapter 3.

You can find out more about the SDK under the developer documentation. At the time of this writing, you could find it here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript. All information, API method calls, and references can be found on the developer documentation site.

The Facebook JavaScript SDK is open source! Although most of its calls are just making requests to Facebook's Graph API, you ...